Trump tests the Constitution’s limits
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. No wonder President-elect Trump demanded that his own party let him make recess appointments. It would allow his more unpopular Cabinet nominees, including the shockingly unfit Matt Gaetz, to bypass the normal Senate confirmation process.
The Journal’s editorial board termed Mr. Trump’s recess-appointment scheme not “unconstitutional" but “anti-constitutional." The board rightly noted that although this plan could be carried out consistent with the Constitution’s language, it would violate the system of checks and balances that undergirds the constitutional structure. Distribution of power among the branches of government is critical.
It’s the Constitution’s principal means for preventing tyranny, which James Madison defined in Federalist No. 47 as the “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands." In the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has announced a series of plans—including the recess-appointment scheme—indicating an intent to enlarge presidential powers beyond those of any peacetime president in U.S.
history. The question is whether the legislative and judicial branches will resist. Madison assumed that human nature would lead officials in different institutions to resist encroachments by the others.
As he argued in Federalist No. 51, through the Constitution, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition." Senators would defend the prerogatives of their institution, as would everyone else in the federal government. These prerogatives include helping to create the executive branch, which rests on legislation enacted by Congress and signed by the president.
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